If this is your first visit, welcome to Reef Frontiers. We have left open the door for you to browse around and check out the site, but we would realy love you to register with us and join in our community, its all free and we have the largest database on the internet to help you be successful.
Once you have completed your registration please come on in and introduce your self in our Introduction forum.
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

On the Lyretail is their a point in time where they decide its time for a second female to become a male?? Twice now I have had a female in an existing harem go dominate and then wipe out the first one??

On the Lyretail is their a point in time where they decide its time for a second female to become a male?? Twice now I have had a female in an existing harem go dominate and then wipe out the first one??

Mojo

This has happened to me twice as well. I had one male and 4 females which turned in to 2 males and 3 females... One of the males killed the other so I was then at 1 male and 3 females, and sure enough within a month I had 2 males and 2 females. About 2.5 months ago one of my males killed the other male, so now I have 1 male and 2 females. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they are done changing after having them for 2.5 years.

In nature they occur in schools of 5,000-7,000 so aggression is dispersed. All the juvenile fish are females so there are plenty of new recruits for up and coming males to form new harems without having to bump off an older male. In addition many fish are eaten each day in the wild which breaks up the harems. The static environment of the home aquarium is quite unnatural for these Anthias. They do pretty well in groups of 10-14 but even then over a period of 5 years or so you can expect to lose a few. This is a species where you can keep a lone male without any problems.

Yes. I have never heard of them being bred in captivity. They are broadcast spawners and the eggs are smaller than a grain of salt. I've had them spawn in the aquarium in a group and the eggs are so small that you can barely see them. They spawn in the evening when the actinics are on. They eat their own eggs but produce thousands of them at once so in the wild many of them escape becoming a meal.

Sounds like an interesting challenge to try and breed them. Just them eating the eggs and trying to separate them would make this very difficult. Hopefully one day someone will succeed.
Thanks again Kevin!